Farmer’s Wife 1930’s – Dolly

Well, wasn’t Dolly a bit of a doozy! I know that with over 50 pieces in a 6″ block, she was intimidating to many, personally I was terrified of her. However I knew that she was a learning experience so I went for it!

I had a little bit of fun with her in the end, this block can look completely different depending on your colour and value placement so she is worth a bit of thought.

If you look at the basic bones of the block, you will see that she is just a 9-patch underneath. We have already made plenty of 9-patch blocks, most simple was Patience which I showed you last year. What this means for us though, is that we have a frame work for piecing and also for trimming Dolly up.

If you need a Foundation Paper Piecing refresher, please feel free to check out my two part tutorial, which you can find HERE.

Without breaching copyright I can’t go into actual measurements specific, however you can use the Marti Michell template B12 to trim your two single corner blocks rather than having to use the single section Foundation Paper Piecing templates.

Similarly, you can see here that I used the template B14 to cut the single triangle sections rather than using the paper piecing templates. I simply sewed it across the corner of the paper pieced section, and then trimmed that corner square. This was much easier than trying to cut it to size with such a small template. You will do this 4 times overall.

Finally, I used other Marti Michell templates to cut the triangles for the rest of the paper piecing parts, particularly the A6 template for the large pink triangles along each side, the N81 triangle template for the 8 small triangles on each quadrant, and finally the N81 square template for the 9 small squares in the centre 9-patch.